The Visual Studio LightSwitch team, in a blog post, announced an important update about the LightSwitch tool that was used to accelerate the development of line-of-business apps. They are going to draw a line to end this tool from the future versions of Visual Studio.

If you are developing apps using LightSwitch, it’s time for you to think and start planning for a smooth migration. Continue to read more about it.

In current market trend, the way the technologies changing, it’s very difficult to say about a particular technology to stay long. The same happened with Silverlight and LightSwitch. The initial days when Visual Studio LightSwitch was first launched, had support for Silverlight to build LOB (Line Of Business) apps easily.

Time changed, the technology changed. Silverlight gone into dormant stage and the HTML/Script supports came. The same was incorporated in LightSwitch app development.

Now time came to end this popular tool. Microsoft in a blog post draw the line to announce the future of LightSwitch: “Visual Studio 2015 is the last release of Visual Studio that includes the LightSwitch tooling and we recommend users not begin new application development with LightSwitch. That said, we will continue to support users with existing LightSwitch applications, including critical bug fixes and security issues as per the Microsoft Support Lifecycle.”.

As per the blog post, they also mentioned: “We no longer recommend LightSwitch for your new apps. But we remain committed to fulfilling our vision to significantly raise the productivity bar for building modern LOB applications”.

So, if you are building apps using Visual Studio LightSwitch, it’s time to think for your app migration. For existing apps, the support will be there as long as the support phase continues for Visual Studio 2015 i.e. till 13/10/2020. As Visual Studio 2015 will be the last version that includes LightSwitch, no templates you are going to see in the future versions of Visual Studio. Hence, don’t think to build any new app using this tool.

It was of course a great tool, but what can we say apart from RIP Visual Studio LightSwitch!!! Let us know your opinion about it.

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About Me

Kunal Chowdhury is a Windows Platform Development MVP of Microsoft, a Telerik MVP, Nokia Developer Champion, Speaker in various Microsoft events, Author, passionate Blogger and a Software Engineer by profession.